The Age Of Adaline

Synopsis: A young woman, Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively), born at the turn of 20th century, is rendered ageless after a freak accident. After a century of loneliness she meets Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman) a man with whom she feels she might be able to share her life.  But will she take a chance on love?

With its golden-tressed heroine of ageless beauty and independent means and its handsome hero similarly financially situated (he’s so well off that he just does philanthropic work) swept up in the sea of love The Age Of Adaline stands or falls as a chick flick.  At least for its first half most guys would be wishing they could be elsewhere as in a slow foreplay the drop-dead gorgeous Adaline firmly rebuffs the recurring attentions of the charming Mr Jones. Fortunately, around the film’s mid-point and with the appearance of Harrison Ford as Jones the elder, the story takes an interesting twist that throws out a small life-raft of reality onto the waves of sappiness that threatened to overwhelm us. It affords us a decent respite from the guff although director Lee Toland Krieger soon returns us to the ocean of make-believe from whence we came.

The Age of Adaline is a seductively well-made film, the visual pleasure it affords lifting it considerably above its Mills and Boonish material.  The wonderfully named Blake Lively, an actress who has previously had minor roles in films such as Oliver Stone’s Savages is no small part of that scopophilic appeal. Presumably female audiences will feel much the same about Dutch actor Michiel Huisman who apparently became a small screen sensation with Game Of Thrones, although I wouldn’t know about that.

Adaline’s strange condition, which is given a pseudo-scientific explanation at the film’s beginning, has dramatic potential but writers J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz choose not to go there. Given that for the bulk of the film Adaline is over 100 years old the possibilities of exploring the experiences of a very old woman inhabiting a very young (and highly attractive body) are tantalizing. Instead Adaline  is simply “suspended” emotionally and psychologically as well as physically in her late twenties. The resulting incongruity between experience and demeanour is most apparent in the scenes in which she is with her daughter.  Ellen Burstyn as the eighty-ish daughter speaks in a matter-of-fact manner appropriate to a woman her age yet Adaline’s voice has all the sweetness of a fairy tale princess.  Ms Lively does this with a kind of appealingly wistful resignation but she’s not remotely believable as woman who’s lived over a hundred years.

Clearly, however such was not what the film-makers were interested in or, for that matter, what audiences for this kind of pipe-dream would be wanting to see.  At least compared to last year’s disastrous fantasy romance Winter’s Tale The Age Of Adaline is coherent and well-executed.  But still, it’s strictly for chicks.

 

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